'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 31

Short Stories 366:284 — “Lost Hearts,” in the style of M.R. James

[image error]In what I can only call an amusing “gotcha” from last week’s “Casting the Runes” from the same audio performances, The Conception of Terror, “Lost Hearts” was a complete reversal of everything I described about loving in the previous story in the collection. That isn’t to say it’s not a solid, well-performed, dark and creepy story of horror—it absolutely is, complete with the usual hopelessness, no-way-out, and evil-wins that generally leaves me so frustrated as a reader.

“Lost Hearts” brings us Stephanie, a foster kid who’s taken off from more than one foster home in the past, who is more-or-less on a last-chance with her next placement before she’s just put into non-family care. She arrives at Aswarby House, a shiny, pristine tower, and is stunned at how beautiful the place is. The whole place is atypical: beautiful, full of middle-aged people, and run like a co-op. There’s only one other kid there, Ben, who is about her age and the foster kid of the man who lives on the Penthouse floor. They bond in an adorkable way, and then, of course, the horrors begin.

It’s only because of “Casting the Runes” that I held out hope to the end of this story, but “Lost Hearts” has a far more typical horror ending. Stephanie begins isolated, catches a glimmer of friendship and connection with Ben, Ben goes missing, and it’s a pretty fast ride back to hopelessness from that point onward. It’s well written, and well performed (the dramatization did a great job of the ghostly whispers Stephanie hears, for example) and it’s only ten days into October and I’d already like to go back to my happy-ever-afters, please. This one is definitely not a tale for those who like their creep factor to include a note of triumph.

Short Stories 366:283 — “Nothing to Worry About,” by Matthew Bright

[image error]Some horror stories sneak up on you. They sort of settle in a few steps behind, whistling while you’re reading, and it’s only as you keep going that you realize they’re whistling just slightly out of tune, and it’s a creepy kids rhyme they’re whistling, and then before you know it you turn around and they’re directly behind you and smiling like a freaking clown or something and bam.

Full on body-shudder.

“Nothing to Worry About,” is one of those types of stories, in that it’s has this overall tone to it that slips in small increments as the story progresses. A pregnant woman and her fella are waiting for a home visit. She’s prepared the house as best she can, though her husband seems bound and determined to not care, or maybe he’s just an asshole, or…

Something isn’t right.

When the social worker shows up, and starts interviewing the woman, she’s desperate to get the answers right, and she’s doing everything in her power to please this woman, and it soon becomes obvious that the woman is just as aware, and that feeling of “not-right” starts to head further south to “very-wrong.”

The ending was a short, sharp shock, and the realization of just what Bright was doing with this story—and the commentary he creates about a domestic and political sort of horror—had me leaning back in my chair. It’s a smart sort of horror, and all too easily imaginable.

Short Stories 366:282 — “Seb and Duncan and the Sirens,” by Alex Jeffers

[image error]You’ve often heard me rail and gnash my teeth around how poorly gay-for-you/out-for-you is done in romance, and how when it’s done well, it can be handled so well, with interior thoughts that admit to leanings (however slight) in a pan-, bi-, or demisexual way. Well, it turns out this freaking disturbing story from Alex Jeffers’s Not Here. Not Now. does exactly that, by dropping us in the head of Seb while he’s on a vacation with Duncan. Duncan is a physical marvel, and their friendship is as much a confusion to the two of them as it is to outsiders, with Seb being pale and hairy and near-sighted and gangly and having talents most related to a highly organized mind and a perfect ear for pitch. Duncan is outgoing, Seb is not. Duncan has no trouble finding willing partners, Seb… well, you get the idea.

But this vacation in Greece takes a turn for the odd when they meet a man and woman who bother Seb on a borderline intuitive level: he finds their voices dissonant, and while he does take Duncan’s advice to go on a minor detour with the sister (mostly so Duncan can have a “detour” with the brother), Seb finds himself on an impromptu tour of some really disturbing siren statuary hidden from public view, and their vacation starts to slide a little left of normalcy.

So, mythical beings trying to rend human flesh doesn’t really seem like a good place to have sexual awakenings, but when we’re talking about sirens, who can charm anyone with their song, and when we put that in the hands of Alex Jeffers? Well. The end result is a disturbing, borderline body-horror series of events, alongside some pretty erotic passages, which, hey, horror and sexuality are often bedfellows, no? “Seb and Duncan and the Sirens” stuck with me for a few days after reading, and I caught myself eyeing statues, wondering at every strange twist or shift in my own not-so-coherent skeletal structure, and shuddering. So, job well done.

Short Stories 366:281 — “Names,” by Jennifer Lee Rossman

[image error]One of the things about Nothing Without Us that is a real delight is how the tales sharing a constant of disability means the range and breadth of what genre and style of storytelling is left completely wide open. Take, as a great example, the super-freaking-creepy “Names,” by Jennifer Lee Rossman, wherein Beck, Rossman’s autistic protagonist, brushes across something unnatural when a coyote with “people eyes” crosses in front of her, and she realizes something is—or is about to be—terribly wrong.

The supernatural blends with Beck’s point of view seamlessly, and as she navigates the horrible reality of a murder, and her awareness that she alone knows the who, and more importantly how, behind the crime, her options narrow to working with one of the few people who kinda-sorta gets how to interact with her. Blue, her name for the local sheriff (Beck has her own names for people), seems willing to work with her if it might solve the crime, and the narrative spins from there.

My favourite sort of horror writing is always the kind that places the characters within a  system or understanding and gives them the opportunity of turnabout. In this case, Rossman takes the notion of names and the idea of the power of knowing someone’s name and then gives the whole a good shake and twist, and while the biting and the blood and the horror still unfolds, through Beck’s lens, the result is ultimately triumphant, even as it induces a few shudders along the way.

Short Stories 366:280 — “Sugardaddy,” by Craig Laurance Gidney

[image error]For those of you who’ve been following this project, you may have noticed I discussed pretty much every story from Skin Deep Magic: Short Fiction back over Pride Month and the weeks after, and might wonder why this single story is here in October. Well, not to put too find a point on it, but it’s here because “Sugardaddy” freaked me right the hell out. It’s my own fault, in that I kept reading it at night before I went to bed even when I realized it was going somewhere really shudder-inducing. And—as no doubt I’ll admit all month long—I ended up having horrible dreams because of it.

So! “Sugardaddy.” “Sugardaddy” is about Tasha, and is told in epistolary format. Tasha has just moved to Mercury Towers, and she hates it. She and her mother, a nurse, are here alone, and they have left Tasha’s father behind, for reasons that drip into the narrative like specks of blood throughout the story’s telling, with every bit of ominous feeling I can ascribe to that metaphor being wholly intentional. Oh, and Tasha is also seeing a figure no one else seems to be able to see, a pupil-less little purple-Black man who has sharp claws, teeth like glass, and seems to feed on… something… from people.  Tasha can see him, and it’s obvious he knows she can see him, and Tasha can’t help but be drawn to the strange creature/man.

Tasha’s life is not good: there’s the slow-drip-reveal of why they left her father behind, there’s the reality of being fat in a new school, and their new home has bed bugs and basically the whole of everything is awful. You get the sense that half the reason Tasha fixates on the strange creature/man is that it’s something she can control. And when the two touch, and Tasha begins to change, things go from awful to a kind of empowering horrible that… well. Everything collides: Tasha’s development of abilities (and attributes) in common with the thing, her running out of patience with the horrible kids at school, the ultimate revelations of Tasha’s father, and Tasha’s ultimate choice? Bad dreams, like I said.

Short Stories 366:279 — “Exactly What You Need,” by Brandon Crilly

[image error]One of the best parts about being surrounded by so many wonderful authors through Can*Con every year is finding out how many of those wonderful authors are writers of short fiction (spoiler: I dare say most of them), which lets me track down their stuff and enjoy. In this particular case, all I knew about the story in question was it concerned a magical bookstore, and was written by the lovely Brandon Crilly (who has also been my DM in a D&D game because we are just that cool).

It’s probable that I should have concluded this tale from The Best of Abyss & Apex (Volume Three) was going to go sideways and freaking creepy, but I didn’t, because bookstore, I guess? The result was a shuddery tale that I wasn’t expecting, which honestly was kind of delightful. So. Here’s the set-up: a woman runs a bookstore, flying solo since the passing of her wife, and the store is unusual in that whatever you’re looking for? It’s there.

It’s, as the title says, exactly what you need, and therein lies the rub: because some people need a rare text for their professorial career, and others are looking for a cute abecedarian for their kiddo, and then there are the truly hurt and wounded who are looking to break whatever rules necessary to get back something—or someone—they lost. The “how-to” section was never meant to go this dark… and there’s just one bookseller standing between morality and the unthinkable. Honestly? As a fellow former bookseller, I have to weigh in here: she deserves a raise.

Now, since I know Brandon, I could sneak in a “where did this come from?” e-mail, and here it is:

Ottawa residents might be familiar with a certain Bank St independent bookstore that specializes in used books (which shall remain nameless). I used to make it there a few times a year, usually looking for a specific book or two. Inevitably, every time, I would either find exactly the book I wanted, or another book that I’d been wanting to read a while but couldn’t justify spending full price on. This happened enough times that I started joking the bookstore had a mind of its own … which led to the quasi-benevolent force in this story.

Short Stories 366:278 — “Carmilla,” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

[image error]First off, before I begin, I should point out I read this years and years ago, and barely remembered it, and so when I saw Audible had done a performance version, I nabbed it. Performed by Rose Leslie, Phoebe Fox, and David Tennant and many others, it was delightfully done and dramatized in a way I really enjoyed. I’d forgotten so much about the story, and listening to it was a wonderful way to sink back in.

The framework of Carmilla centres on young Laura telling her story, long after the fact, to a doctor who is a collector of lore about the supernatural and the occult, who is then recounting the tale to you, the reader. Laura begins her tale with something that could easily be discounted as a nightmare (a night visit from a strange woman who cuddled up in bed with her for a brief moment before causing a strange, stabbing pain) if not for the rest of the events to follow.

This rest of the novella is about a young woman left in the care of Laura’s father and home, Carmilla, and the relationship between she and Laura. In turns alluring and disturbing, the gentle creep from friendship to love to something sinister is so well paced, and more, the casual queerness of it all—This was published in 1872!—is just all the more wonderful for the gothic horror of it all. The eventual revelations of Carmilla, including who she actually is, aren’t a surprise or a particularly difficult thing to puzzle out if one is at all a fan of the genre where it stands today, but in the context of this novella having gone there first, Carmilla was enjoyable to revisit.

Short Stories 366:277 — “Casting the Runes,” in the style of M.R. James

[image error]In a refrain I’m sure I’ll often repeat this month, I don’t often do horror as a reader (and even less often as a writer). There are two sides to this: the first is the simple reality of horror getting stuck in my subconscious and leading to terrible dreams, and given I don’t sleep well enough as it is, I don’t need to add to the problem; the second is I like stories that have ultimately triumphant moments, and so many horror stories end with the “dun-dun-dun” effect of even a minor triumph of survival on behalf of the (remaining) characters being negated by showing the big evil isn’t defeated after all. It never feels satisfying to me as a reader.

“Casting the Runes,” the first audio performance in The Conception of Terror, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of horror story I enjoy reading, and while it can’t be without cost, the ultimate destination of this story had me darkly satisfied. The set-up is simple: Jo Harrington is asked to anonymously peer review a paper on alchemy by Anton Karswell, and it’s basically trash, so she says as much knowing the rejection will be smoothed out and the wording adjusted, and thinks nothing else of it. Until Anton Karswell shows up at her place of work, politely offers her a signed copy of his book on witchcraft, and she starts to see warnings and portents of her imminent death.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse between Jo, Anton, and Jo’s husband, Edward as Jo fights for her life against forces she didn’t even believe existed a day earlier. As an audio performance, both Anna Maxwell Martin and Tom Burke do a great job of inhabiting their characters of Jo and Edward, and though I felt Karswell came across more whiny and petulant than powerful in Reece Shearsmith’s performance, I think that was purposeful, as he is at his core just a bully with a dangerously big stick. Also, this is horror, so of course there are costs and things aren’t tied up with a ribbon with a happy-ever-after, but as I said before, “Casting the Runes” is darkly satisfying, and by the end of the story I found myself chuckling and nodding and the doggo was regarding me like maybe I was unhinged. So, job well done.

Short Stories 366:276 — “Golden Hair, Red Lips,” by Matthew Bright

[image error]It is no secret I love a retelling or a transposition of a classic character into a new setting, and as such it will likely surprise no one that “Golden Hair, Red Lips,” from Matthew Bright’s brilliant Stories to Sing in the Dark, was an instant favourite.

The time and setting Bright visits is the Castro (San Francisco) during the GRID years (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, which was the precursor name for HIV/AIDS), and the character in question? Dorian Gray.

What unfolds is a man who can never be harmed bearing a kind of witness, but this is Dorian Gray, who is, of course, not a particularly good man, and so his witness is through his particular sensual lens. Dorian can’t be hurt—though of course he does have a background, niggling worry that perhaps this, this could be the thing that gets through—and as this repeated pattern of vibrant love and sensuality fading into death forms an ongoing beat through the story, there’s an incredibly brilliant authenticity to Bright’s presentation: these men in Gray’s life are loving each other all the harder and more passionately for the briefness they’re getting, and there’s Dorian, outside and watching.

And wondering who might be responsible.

The final moments in this story are absolutely shudder-worthy and disturbing and awful—and all too real—all at once. It’s a kind of queer horror I think works the best: grounded in history and reality so firmly, you can almost accept the speculative as fact.

 

Short Stories 366:275 — “Evil Eye,” by Madhuri Shekar

[image error]Okay, it’s October. I’m going to try to bend my discussions for the month in the direction of the freaky or the disturbing (or, sometimes, but likely rarely since I don’t often go there, to outright horror).

I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t often go the route of the horrific or the disturbing in fiction because—I’m totally secure enough to admit this—it tends to get into my head and then I don’t sleep. So if I do allow myself access to horror, it’s during the brightest parts of the morning, or likely not at all, so it has time to slip from my head before bedtime.

That was the case with “Evil Eye.” Available from Audible as an exclusive last year, “Evil Eye” was fully performed with five voice actors and told entirely in phone calls, answering machine messages, and the like—a modern day epistolary format.

It was really good, and because I didn’t want to stop listening the dog got an hour and a half walk so I could have the whole novella in one go. The short version of the set-up is this: a daughter who is absolutely done with her mother trying to match-make from Delhi finally sets up a firm boundary after one last set-up goes wrong.

But at that set-up? She meets someone. When she finally tells her mother, her mother is at first quite happy the man in question is also Indian, but the more the mother learns, the more she starts to worry. Because something feels not just off about this man, but evil in a way that’s far too familiar.

“Evil Eye” is a perfect example of why “X is so done” discussions about any genre convention (in this case the ghosts of the past coming around full circle) is so untrue—the take on this story being from Indian characters with Indian cultural touch points made the story absolutely fresh. So often you hear the “I’m so tired of X” discussions and the only people who’ve had a turn at the plate of whatever X is are the cisgender white nonqueer Western/Christian characters, and… no.

Also, since this was an audiobook, I should point out how the the voice acting was really, really solid and especially the actor who had to use his voice to give the slow revelation of creepy-factor through tone alone? Really nicely done.

If you’re wanting a creepy tale with a fresh angle? Nab this.